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This dissertation unites two seemingly unrelated fields, writing centers and technical writing, to study the feasibility of creating an online technical writing resource. Despite prolonged attention to multiliteracies and collaboration in both subfields, writing centers and technical writing do not commonly implicate one another in their shared mission of shaping students to become savvy writers with an awareness of rhetorical concepts and situations. This dissertation establishes how complementary these two fields are based upon their shared pedagogies of collaboration and multiliteracies. I suggest that a service design approach is beneficial to writing center research. Similarly, the technical writing field has little research and scholarship dedicated specifically to online writing instruction and pedagogy. Historically, writing centers have served students from all disciplines, but research demonstrates the effectiveness of specialist over generalist writing support. Taking a specialist perspective, I use service design methodology to gather input from student and instructor stakeholders about how online writing tutoring and web resources can address their needs. Using survey and interview data, I designed and piloted an online tutoring service for students enrolled in the Technical Writing service course at Virginia Tech. In student and instructor surveys, participants reported that they were highly unlikely to use online tutoring sessions but were more likely to use a course-specific website. Additionally, student interviews revealed that the Writing Center is not necessarily a highly-used resource, especially for upper-level students. Instructor interviewees indicated some misunderstandings and limited views of the Writing Center's mission. Nevertheless, a small number of participants in both groups spoke to a need for specialized tutoring in the Technical Writing course. In terms of feasibility, integration of online services for this course poses the greatest challenge because it relates to the amount of change needed to successfully integrate online tutoring or web resources into the curriculum. With some attention to how OWLs and synchronous online tutoring can be an asset to teaching technical writing online, I argue that the pilot project described in this study is relatively feasible. / Doctor of Philosophy / A feasibility study addresses whether or not an idea or plan is good. In the case of this dissertation, the idea is whether or not to offer online writing services—such as tutoring and a repository website—to students enrolled in Technical Writing at Virginia Tech. In order to study the feasibility of this plan, I first argue for bringing together the fields of writing centers and technical writing. Two strong reasons for uniting these fields are based upon their shared methods and practices of teaching collaboration and multiliteracies. Multiliteracies in this dissertation refers to critical, functional, and rhetorical computer literacies; each literacy is important for Technical Writing students to develop as they enter their future careers. Historically, writing centers are places on a college or university campus where students from all disciplines can go for tutoring; this is known as the generalist approach to writing tutoring. However, research demonstrates the effectiveness of a specialist approach—where a tutor is familiar with a student’s discipline—to writing tutoring over generalist writing support. Therefore, I take a specialist perspective in this study. I use service design system of methods to gather input from student and instructor stakeholders about how online writing tutoring and web resources can address their needs. Service design is commonly used in the service economy, such as restaurants and hotels, in order to design or redesign services. In particular, service design focuses on people and their needs. Using survey and interview data, I designed and piloted an online tutoring service and a website for students enrolled in the Technical Writing service course at Virginia Tech. In student and instructor surveys, participants reported that they were highly unlikely to use online tutoring sessions but were more likely to use a course-specific website. Additionally, student interviews revealed that the Writing Center at Virginia Tech is not necessarily a highly-used resource, especially for upper-level students. Instructor interviewees indicated some misunderstandings and limited views of the Writing Center’s mission. Nevertheless, a small number of participants in both groups spoke to a need for specialized tutoring in the Technical Writing course. In terms of feasibility, integration of online services for this course poses the greatest challenge because it relates to the amount of change needed to successfully integrate online tutoring or web resources into the curriculum. With some attention to how online writing labs and synchronous online tutoring can be an asset to teaching technical writing online, I argue that the pilot project described in this study is relatively feasible.

This study examined changes in kindergarteners' writing complexity after implementing writing instruction based on story elements (character, setting, problem, and solution). Writing samples from six students of three ability levels (i.e., beginning, intermediate, and advanced) were collected over a six-week period within a guided writing context. These samples included three types of texts (oral language, pictures, and written text)and were analyzed using two analytic rubrics specifically created for this study, one for writing development and the other for the inclusion of story elements. Findings from this study suggest that all students, regardless of ability level wrote in more complex ways when they used story elements as cues to incorporate detail into their writing. Additionally, all of the students included the four story elements in varying degrees, and the acknowledgment and use of different types of text in each writing sample provided a more accurate representation of the student authors' thinking.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges faced by first-year students as they negotiated the transition from the wrting environment of high school to the writing environment of university. The research for the dissertation was undertaken using a mixed-method explanatory design. This yielded a description of students' perceptions of the differences between their high school writing and first-year university writing environments. The research questions were as follows: what are high school students' perceptions of their writing environment; and what differences, if any, do students perceive as different in the writing environment between high school and first-year university? A total of one hundred and forty-four Grade 12 students completed a quantitative survey asking for their perceptions of the high school writing environment, and twenty students took part either in qualitative focus groups or individual interviews. A follow-up interview was conducted with fourteen of the original twenty participants while they were in the process of completing their first term at university. The results indicated that students' perceptions were very much influenced by individual teachers and instructors and by their own expectations. Recommendations, implications for further research, and implications for program development are offered as a way to extend the knowledge in this area.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges faced by first-year students as they negotiated the transition from the wrting environment of high school to the writing environment of university. The research for the dissertation was undertaken using a mixed-method explanatory design. This yielded a description of students' perceptions of the differences between their high school writing and first-year university writing environments. The research questions were as follows: what are high school students' perceptions of their writing environment; and what differences, if any, do students perceive as different in the writing environment between high school and first-year university? A total of one hundred and forty-four Grade 12 students completed a quantitative survey asking for their perceptions of the high school writing environment, and twenty students took part either in qualitative focus groups or individual interviews. A follow-up interview was conducted with fourteen of the original twenty participants while they were in the process of completing their first term at university. The results indicated that students' perceptions were very much influenced by individual teachers and instructors and by their own expectations. Recommendations, implications for further research, and implications for program development are offered as a way to extend the knowledge in this area.

This thesis attempts to reclaim the imagination, defined by Ann Berthoff as the "name for the active mind," by looking at brain biology as it relates to teaching and learning. The section titled "Keeping Biology in Mind: The Brain as Speculative Instrument" demonstrates how biological naturalism, a philosophy developed by John Searle, validates the concept of an ontologically subjective "I" and hence the creation of course materials based on David Kolb's experiential-learning model. In addition, it discusses how biologist James Zull maps the actual structure of the brain onto Kolb's model. Adding to this bottom-up theory of learning that emphasizes brain biology and subjective experience, this thesis discusses how the mind, through mental force, works in a top-down fashion to change the brain, and suggests that students can learn to take control of their own learning by applying mental force. The section titled "Keeping Affect in Mind: The Biology of Intuition" presents the aspect of affect known as intuition and how it fits into the discussion. The main premise of this thesis is that we can employ concepts of the brain and learning in the composition classroom to facilitate the teaching and learning of writing. The last section titled "Keeping Composition in Mind: Theory into Practice" is devoted to this premise on a practical level.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction / Lotta Larson / Writing teachers teach students to read, write, and think through text. They draw upon their own comprehension to determine if, when, and how to intervene in directing students to deeper, more thoughtfully written texts by encouraging them to monitor and regulate their thoughts—to be metacognitive. Writing itself has been called “applied metacognition,” for it is essentially the production of thought (Hacker, Keener, & Kircher, 2009, p. 154). Yet little is known about the metacognitive practices and behaviors of those who teach writing. The purpose of this instrumental, collective case study was to explore and describe writing teachers’ metacognition as they took part in two range-finding events in a midwestern school district. Participants were tasked with reading and scoring student essays and providing narrative feedback to fuel training efforts for future scorers of the district’s writing assessments. Each range-finding event constituted a case with fourteen participants. Three administrative facilitators and four retired English teachers participated in both events, along with seven different practicing teachers per case. The study concluded that, indeed, participants perceived and regulated their thinking in numerous ways while reading and responding to student essays. With Flavell’s (1979) theoretical model of metacognition as a framework for data analysis, 28 distinct content codes emerged in the data: 1) twelve codes under metacognitive knowledge of person, task, and strategy, 2) seven codes under metacognitive experiences, 3) six codes under metacognitive goals (tasks), and 4) three codes under metacognitive actions (strategies). In addition, three dichotomous themes emerged across the cases indicating transformational distinctions in teachers’ thinking: 1) teaching writing and scoring writing, 2) confusion and clarity, and 3) frustrations and fruits. The study highlighted the potential of improving teachers’ meta-thinking about teaching and assessing writing through dialectic conversations with other professionals. Its findings and conclusions implicate teacher educators, practicing teachers, and school district administrators to seek opportunities for cultivating teachers’ awareness, monitoring, and regulation of their thoughts about content, instruction, and selves to better serve their students.

<div>Circulation studies, as the theory of ecological spread of information, impacts public perception of knowledge-making, and digital circulation (i.e. online information sharing) impacts what people expect online knowledge-making and online education is or should be. Online education is becoming a new norm for students and universities at a time when economic pressure is pushing both to be more austere and expedient; at the same time, circulation collapses together the complex ways we communicate, making them harder to differentiate. This dissertation responds to these conditions by focusing on the labor behind circulation and Online Writing Instruction (OWI) in order to study knowledge-making online. Through focus groups with instructors, case studies, and surveys of students in online classes, this dissertation identifies strategies that benefit both teachers and students and improve Online Writing Classes. This work intersects with recent considerations of how mis- and dis-information spread online, the impact of Data Science and Information Theory on communication and knowledge-making, and how to make universities accessible to more people.</div><div><br></div><div>Chapter 1 overviews the history of Distance Education (DE) and Online Education (OE) as well as the relevant disciplinary distinctions OWI makes for itself. Chapter 1 also identifies theoretical and practical challenges OE finds for itself and overviews recent shifts in OE student populations. Chapter 2 contextualizes the challenges OE and OWI face in a larger ecology of Information Theory, Rhetoric and Composition theory and practice, Technical Communication theory and practice, and Neoliberal economics, positing ecological links between modern data science, digital circulation, and economics. In doing so, Chapter 2 offers a rhetorical interpretation of the DIKW pyramid and definitions of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom (D, I, W, and W respectively) for rhetorical practitioners. Chapter 3 follows up on Chapter 2’s arguments to respond with research on teacher and student labor in online classes with methods for such inquiry, through focus groups, case studies, and surveys. Chapter 4 presents data from all stages of that inquiry, and Chapter 5 connects together observations from the data with theory from Chapters 1 and 2 to draw more concrete conclusions.</div><div><br></div>